


Last Summer

by ShannaraIsles



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Bittersweet, Child Cullen, Family, Fluffy, Gen, Gift Fic, Memories, Old Man Cullen, angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-06-01 07:14:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15137927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShannaraIsles/pseuds/ShannaraIsles
Summary: A child lives in the moment that an old man remembers.A gift for a sweet friend.





	Last Summer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skyholdherbalist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyholdherbalist/gifts).



Fresh tilled earth between chubby fingers, the smell of peat and loam to match the mix of dark dirt clinging to his skin. Gardening with Mother is always fun; she never complains about dirt on hands, under nails, on clothing. She kneels beside him and hums to herself, her own clever hands crusted with wet earth as seeds find their way into dark beds for the winter, as dead leaves and stalks are cut away in spring. Mother’s garden is magical, Cullen is convinced, no matter what Bran says. Mother can bring a dead tree back to life in just a few weeks; Mother can make food from nothing but her carefully turned soil. Mother isn’t a mage, but Mother is still magical to the small boy who sits beside her, giggling at the sensation of earth worms between his fingers.

Mother always smells like her garden, like good honest soil and rich greenery. Not like elfroot or spindleweed, like some of the other women in the village, but like the little bush she says is a tree, with its horrible black berries and pretty white flowers. She smells like summer, like the little flowers do when they first open up to the sunshine. Cullen doesn’t like the way they smell after that, but Mother can do wonderful things with the flowers. No matter how bad they smell when she starts making the special drink with them, it always smells and tastes like that first opening, the first breath of summer. She says the tree is special, that it keeps trouble away. He believes her with all his heart - what reason does she have to lie to her golden-haired boy, with his shining amber-warm eyes and curious sweetness?

Mia sometimes helps in the garden, but she isn’t allowed to pick the elderflowers when Mother makes cordials and lotions from it. Cullen does that, tottering down the uneven path with a basket almost bigger than he is, to plunk himself down in the shade of the oak that leans over their garden and pick the wide heads of tiny, fragrant flowers at their best that smell like the woman he loves the most in all the world. Sometimes his little fingers are clumsy and crush the petals; sometimes they drop their pollen all over him, and his eyes itch and water when he rubs them. But Mother washes the pollen away, and the itching goes away with it; she never minds bruised petals, not when her littlest boy comes up to her with a basket overflowing with the precious bounty from her magical tree. She smiles when Cullen presents his basket with pride, year after year, proud of his efforts in her garden, especially that year when she made Rosalie in her belly while still tending to the house and her family.

And in autumn, when the black berries are ripe, it is Cullen again who takes up his basket and fills it with the fruit of the elder tree, careful not to eat them or to lick his fingers. Mother told him once that the berries would make him sick if he ate them, and he didn’t listen. His tummy hurt _forever_ when he tasted the black berries, hours and hours of aching and throwing up, and Mother sitting beside his bed with gentle eyes. He never tasted the berries again, but Father does. Father waits until Mother has done her special magic with them and they are safe in the bottles that smell strong enough to make Cullen’s eyes water. Father and Mother drink from those bottles sometimes, and they dance together in the dark of the kitchen when the children are supposed to be asleep. Cullen doesn’t know what makes the berry juice so strong, but he likes to lie awake and listen to his parents laughing together when they drink it. Father does not laugh enough, except when he is with Mother.

It isn’t until he is older that Cullen gets to taste the elderberry wine, screwing up his face at the fermented taste, grinning as his expression makes Father laugh and Mother smile. He does not like what comes from the berries, but what Mother makes with the flowers is special. The cordial is sweet with honey and tastes of summer; the lotion makes her hands smell like summer all year ‘round. Summer is his favorite time; as he ages, he always comes back to Mother and her garden, to till the soil and plants the seeds, to cut back the dead wood from the special elder tree. Even when he goes away, he remembers the smell. When summer comes, and the elder is in bloom, he feels a pang of regret for leaving home, and hopes that Mother still has helping hands for tending her magical garden.

He goes back before leaving for Kirkwall. He knows they won’t be there, his heart aching with grief for the loss of the parents who raised him with love. The Blight has tainted the home he loved, old blood still staining the places where his parents fell together beneath the cruel weapons of the darkspawn horde. The garden is in ruins, overgrown with weeds already; the old oak shattered and dead, casting eldritch shadows over the darkened ground. _I should have been here._ Tears cloud his vision as he turns away, needing to escape the mindless violence that destroyed the place where he was happiest, and the scent of summer touches his nose, stilling his steps before he can retreat. He turns once again, blinking those tears from his eyes, and finds again the shattered oak.

Beneath it, still blooming in the midst of all this death, the fragrant white flowers of his mother’s elder tree, a touch of her everyday magic remaining to curb the pain that blossoms in this broken place. A part of her still lives in the tree she loved, refusing to die when all else is lost. He remembers the sound of her humming voice as her hands turned the soil; the weight of his basket brimming with those blooms; the sweet smell of summer that lingers still in the lotions he pays twice their worth for when the peddlers pass his way. He moves to the little tree, drawing the dagger from his belt, cutting away the dead wood, the clinging vines. Giving it another year to live and be strong, perhaps, before the gentle memory dies completely. And he smiles, sad and broken, whispering his last farewell to the parents he loved, the home that was his refuge in the dark times so recently endured. 

Home is gone, and so are they. He will not return here.

 

* * *

 

The old man kneels in his garden, hands callused by his years of weapons’ play and gnarled with age gentle as they turn the soil beneath leaves that sway to the breeze. This is his place, calm and safe, away from the haunted days of his youth, the renewing of happiness in his prime, the darker days that had followed. A small girl sits beside him, all giggling smiles and clumsy hands, plucking the white flowers from the elder tree to fill a basket almost as big as she is. He isn’t quite sure who she is, or where she came from, but he loves his little companion as dearly as his own mother loved him, passing on all she taught him as his days grow shorter. The eyes that look back at him aren’t his mother’s eyes, but the eyes he loved after her, eyes whose name escapes him more often than not with a sad frustration. Each day, he loses something more of the man he was, and returns once again to his childhood, to fresh tilled earth and the scent of summer in the air.

His little companion shuffles closer, resting her head against his arm, and he sits back on his heels, wiping his hands clean to stroke his crabbed fingers over the red-gold curls that crown her, hearing her whisper. _Tell me about your mama, grandpa._ Even she knows that his childhood is the only thing he recalls with clarity, the only thing the lyrium has not stolen from him. But this, he can tell her - about the hours spent tending to the garden, about elderflower cordial and elderberry wine, about humming and laughing and dancing, and the summer that never ends, so long as his mind can recall it.

And he remembers, for a moment, the love that gave him a wife and a child, and from that child, this grandchild who trusts and loves him in return. He has lost so much. But he does not regret a moment of the years that were gifted to him, the years of love that healed his heart and returned him to the land he had been born to. He lifts his granddaughter onto his knees, holding her close as she sighs happily, remembering all too briefly the times when he held his child in his arms and watched his wife tend this garden under his eye. Yet the memory that rises and remains is Mother, with her smiling hum and her magical tree, her loving and Father’s laughing, Mia and Bran and Rosalie playing ... and the summer that lasts forever.


End file.
